Life's little lessons

As I enjoyed my mostly blogless fall break, I did several things that I don't normally do: first, I videotaped myself trimming my toenails, and second, I revisited the Matrix sequels, two films which I quite enjoy, but haven't watched in well over two years.

While the toenails are a bit harder to explain, the movies are the sum of the remainder of an unbalanced equation inherent to the programming of the Matrix. Plus, I really like them, in spite of what everyone else on Earth thinks of them. Concordantly, I got a rush of nostalgia from watching them, and suddenly remembered a ton of stuff pertaining to the two years before my senior year of high school. Vis-a-vis, forensics, theatre, journalism, mixed chorus, English 11, precalculus, and some other stuff, all rushed back into my mind. But there was a problem: all I could remember of the subjects were bullet points. There was nothing of substance in my memories, no recollection of the events, just the facts that I wrote such and such a column, and that I made it to state, but didn't qualify for finals.

It was some time in the middle of my watching The Matrix Revolutions that I got an email from an old friend of mine, who graduated back in 2004. Actually, he was much more than a friend. He was certainly something that I would call an idol. He was valedictorian of his class, he could act, dance, sing, place in state finals, everything. And it was at that point that I felt, "Wow... There's something behind this."

And so I went for my trademark walk around the cross-country track. I go out there a lot, when I need to think about things that are going on in my life, and this was certainly something. I began talking out loud to myself, concerned primarily about the fact that 2004 was rushing back to me, yet I couldn't remember any of it, and that since it was decidedly the last year before the major life changes began to take place, it held some significance in my current predicament.

And I made some important discoveries on my walk, mostly that it's fun to yell things in a public area while nobody else is around. But the revelation I feel like I was meant to make didn't come until Monday. I had just gotten back to my dorm from lunch, and was watching some of the specials on the second disc of Revolutions when I discovered as I walked to my sink to brush my teeth that my sink was nearly full of rust-infested water. Long story short, some calls were made around, and then the plumber on campus came in to look at my sink, remove the U-bend, stick a snake tube in to remove the obstruction, realize that the obstruction was much further down than he had thought, get a bigger snake tube to go further down, and finally unclog my sink.

It was after all this, as I was brushing my teeth, that I figured out what I was supposed to learn from all this: when you don't like the way something is, change it.

I'm sure that all of you are probably zOMG'ing about that no-duh revelation, but honestly, it wasn't something I had considered before. I was so used to letting myself believe that things in life will happen how they will happen, and that there isn't much that we can do about any of the circumstances we find ourselves in, but there it was, a solution to my sink problem.

And maybe there is merit to try, trying again. As much grief as I gave the concept in one of my earlier posts, the obstruction was cleared after the plumber went and got a different tool.

And I think that's what made me a happier person before my snior year of high school. I didn't accept circumstances as they were, I set out to achieve my goals even if I was afraid to do so. I think that's what I need to do now. I need to fix things that I have problems with, even if it'll take a little work.

Ergo, I hereby rescind any and all times in which I might have said that "this is just how things go."

If at first, you don't succeed...

That's the creed that we learned by repitition when we were kids. What we will likely tell our own successors. Try, try again. Because everything in this world can be earned if you fight for it, relentlessly and whole-heartedly.

It's even the theme of one of the stories in Big Fish. The one, ironically, where the main character's father is explaining the courtship of his mother. He takes every opportunity to learn more about her, what she likes, where she lives, what she does. And the son of a gun gets the dame. They get married with the little money that he has, and they live together happily. Not likely ever after, but happily all the same.

When I think about that now, I also think of when I worked on staff at my high school newspaper. Everyone on staff, except for a couple of lucky souls, were editors or co-editors of one section or another. What being an editor entailed was putting together the page layout of your section, deciding what stories would run every month, and the usual reporting slag that everyone on staff had to subject themselves to. After all, we were a newspaper of about 12 workers strong.

And usually things went running pretty smoothly. Sure, it was a grind writing and rewriting and rewriting and rewriting (no joke, four draft minimum). But we did it because there was something to it all that we felt, this was fun to do, and it was worth doing. The people need news.

But there were times when life outside of the newsroom would take over. And it wasn't that we couldn't work on the paper. Rather, we let our stories slide because it felt good to not write up a draft this day or that day. We were all guilty of it at least once, so there isn't anyone who can or should shoulder all of the blame.

Still, when we counted on others to do their share of a section, it was on them. We would do everything we had to in order to get our parts of the final product to the printers, and if they needed help, we were glad to offer (it was our asses on the line, after all).

But when it came right down to it, we had made an agreement that we would split the work. To make deadline, we would all rely on each other.

And putting your hope in somebody else can sometimes lead to a deadline being missed. It's a disappointment to be let down by somebody else, but if you don't make every effort to do everything you can do, the person you should really be disappointed in is yourself.

Others have their own stuff to do. Their own stories to write. If them doing their own thing lets you down now and then, all you can do is make a late deadline, and give the next shot your all.